Spirits in the Wires

by Charles de Lint

  “Let’s take the bus. Does it go as far as we need to go?”

  Aaran nodded. “We can take the subway up as far as Alicia and Moore and transfer from there. But what’s wrong with a cab?”

  “We’ll probably still be talking about all of this and when you’re in a cab, you don’t think the driver’s listening to every word you say?”

  “But there’ll be even more people on public transport.”

  “That’s true,” she said. “But only ten percent of them actually pay any attention to what the people around them are talking about. We’ll just sit among the other ninety percent.”

  “And we’ll know the difference because… ?”

  “I’m good at noticing that kind of thing.”

  Aaran laughed. “Okay. You want to make some toast while I finish cooking us brunch?”

  “Love to,” she said as she trailed into the kitchen behind him.

  She touched his arm before he could pick up the whisk to beat the eggs.

  “This’ll all work out,” she said. “That’s why doing the right thing is always the right thing to do.”

  “We’ll see,” he told her. “But these people dislike me something fierce. And …” He hesitated, then added, “I guess with good cause.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  Aaran shook his head. He couldn’t believe this woman. She was living under the worst circumstances he could imagine—penniless, homeless, and apparently, though he found this hard to believe, friendless—and yet she was still so upbeat and positive.

  “I’m beginning to really like you,” he said.

  “It’s always good to be liked,” Suzi told him, “but don’t go getting any ideas. It could never work out between us.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because no matter what happened, I’d always be the homeless woman you took in off the street. That simple truth would lie under everything else. You don’t think it would matter, but you’d never forget it either.”

  Aaran started to protest.

  “And neither would I,” she added.

  Christy

  It’s midmorning and we’re still playing the waiting game, killing time until Estie and the rest of Holly’s computer friends show up. Dick’s finally come out of his room, but it’s only to go downstairs and dust the already immaculate bookshelves. It’s how he deals, Holly says. The rest of us sit around in the kitchen, drinking too much coffee and tea while Robert noodles on his guitar, though for me to call it noodling is a real injustice. Somehow he can take the most simple progressions and infuse them with all these layers of nuance and meaning. I know that. I know he’s good. Normally I’d be captivated, but today the magic he’s waking from that old Gibson of his just disappears into the background, the way everything else that doesn’t concern Saskia does.

  Occasionally one of us starts to talk, and somebody else joins in, but after a few moments the conversation always comes around to the problem at hand, and there’s nothing new we can add to that. All we can do is speculate. Too much speculation and you begin to feel crazy.

  We end up with a lot of big holes in the conversation—not the comfortable kind you have when you’re together with friends, but they aren’t entirely uncomfortable, either. They’re just… periods of waiting. Stretches of silence, where time slows down until minutes feel like days and hours never seem to finish. But it’s not like we can really do anything. Everything we can do has already been done. It wasn’t much. We cleared all the books out of the dining room and got the old computer out of the basement and set it up on the table in there. Checked to make sure it’s still working. Plugged the modem in and checked it as well, though not by logging on to the Word wood site.

  And that was it. Now there’s nothing to do but wait.

  I’m not good at waiting, so I keep coming out here onto the fire escape. I’m not entirely sure why. Having yet another smoke is only an excuse, it’s not the reason. I don’t think I’m specifically trying to avoid the people inside. After all, Geordie’s my brother, Holly’s a very dear friend, and I’ve really come to like Dick over the past year. The two strangers to me, Bojo and Robert, are the kind of people I’d normally want to listen to for hours, taking notes in my head while they talk. But right now I can’t seem to spend more than ten minutes sitting with the group of them in the kitchen before I start getting all antsy and have to come out here on the fire escape again.

  I hear the screen door open behind me and turn to see Geordie coming out to join me.

  “How are you holding up?” he asks.

  I shrug. “Okay, considering.”

  He leans on the railing beside me and looks off down the alley the way I’ve been doing for the past few hours whenever I’ve been out here. Mostly nothing happens except for that one scrawny alley cat making his rounds, and people from the shops that back onto the alley stepping out for a smoke, or throwing their garbage into the dumpster. Once, a couple of kids in their late teens did a furtive exchange at the far end of the alley, standing close to each other, looking about as suspicious as you can as one of them passed something to another. Probably a drug deal. But who knows? Maybe they were just trading a different kind of crack—registration codes for bootlegged software. Though you’d expect them to do that on-line.

  “It’s funny,” Geordie says after we’ve been standing there awhile, “but I’m not even tired.”

  “I know what you mean,” I tell him. “It’s been a long time since I’ve pulled an all-nighter.”

  Geordie nods. “I’ve got that taste in my mouth and a bit of a burn behind my eyes, but that’s about it. I keep expecting to crash, but I guess the adrenaline’s still got me firing on all cylinders.” He gives me a small humourless smile. “Even though we’re all just waiting around like this, doing nothing.”

  I think about what I can add to that and come up empty. I consider lighting up another cigarette, but that doesn’t have any immediate appeal either. The silence starts to drag out, but before it becomes uncomfortable, we hear the door open again. I turn and think there’s no one there until I lower my gaze and see Dick standing in the doorway, looking anxious. It must be hard to get noticed sometimes, when you’re barely two feet tall, never mind having that whole “most people can’t see you” fairy thing going for you.

  “Master and Master Riddell,” he says. “Mistress Holly says you’d better come quick.”

  I squat on my haunches so that I’m not towering over him.

  “What’s happening?” I ask. “Is Estie here?”

  I’m surprised that we hadn’t heard them arrive—or at least Snippet’s welcoming barks.

  He shakes his head. “Other guests have come,” he says. He hesitates, then adds, “Maybe not so welcome.”

  I don’t like the sound of that at all.

  When he turns, Geordie and I follow him through an empty kitchen, then down the stairs where we can hear voices ahead. I don’t know who I’m expecting as we step into the store, but if I’d had to guess, Aaran Goldstein would have been the last person on the list. He’s standing just inside the front door by the recent arrivals shelf with a briefcase in his hand and a pretty girl I don’t recognize at his side. She’s short and slender and I can’t place her age. Her blonde spiky hair, the faded green cargo pants and grey hooded jersey make her look younger than I feel she is. What I do know is that she’s not the kind of person I’d expect to see in Aaran’s company.

  Holly and Bojo are talking to them, with Snippet staring at them from around Holly’s legs. I have to look around to find Robert. He’s standing down one of the aisles, just out of the line of vision of Aaran and his friend.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Geordie says as we approach the group.

  He’s got a glare fixed on Aaran, and I can hear the anger in his voice. I give him a surprised look. Geordie’s such an easygoing guy that I can’t remember the last time I actually heard him raise his voice. But he’s loyal almost to a fault, and I gu
ess the way Aaran’s treated both Saskia and me over the years just pushes all the wrong buttons, even for a gentle soul like my brother.

  Then we find out what Aaran’s been telling the others, and I have to put a hand on Geordie’s arm as he takes a sudden step forward.

  “Let him talk,” I say. “It’s not like he meant for this to get as out of hand as it has.”

  I’m surprised to find myself defending him. It’s funny. Aaran’s such an officious little prick, and I’ve never liked him, but I can’t even seem to find the energy to get mad at him right now. And there I was, out on the fire escape a few hours ago, ready to do physical harm to whoever was responsible for this nightmare. I guess in the end I’m more like Geordie usually is than like our older brother Paddy was.

  Geordie gives me a surprised look. “But—”

  I shake my head. “No. This isn’t about bad reviews or how much we hate to see dipstick here strutting around like he owns the world. This is about Saskia. It’s her life that’s at stake and I’d deal with the devil if that’s what it’ll take to get her back.”

  “Not sure I’d recommend that,” Robert says stepping out of the aisle where he’s been standing. “Dealing with the devil,” he clarifies. “I’m behind you on every other count.”

  We go upstairs and crowd into the kitchen, bringing in extra chairs from the dining room so that everyone can have a seat. The woman with Aaran is Suzi Chancey, a street person he’s just met today. For those of us who know Aaran—which would be Holly, Geordie and myself—the idea that Aaran would stop to talk to a street person, never mind bring them home, is almost as surprising as finding Aaran knocking on Holly’s door. What doesn’t surprise us is what we learn when he goes back through his whole story and we find out why he was getting this Jackson Hart fellow to sic a virus on the Wordwood site. That’s the pure, mean-spirited Aaran Goldstein we know, through and through.

  But I’ll give him this. He seems genuinely regretful for what he’s done— especially when he finds out that Saskia was one of the victims.

  “Wait a minute,” Suzi says to us. “Are you trying to tell me that you actually believe that people have disappeared into the Internet?”

  “I know what I saw,” I tell her.

  “And if pixies can come out of the Internet,” Holly adds, “I’m not surprised that people can get trapped in it.”

  That comment requires a sidebar. Neither Aaran nor Suzi seem completely convinced by Holly’s story, though when Dick does his sudden “I’ve been here all along” pop into view, I can see the cogs of reconsideration start to turn in their heads.

  Bojo, Geordie, and Robert have been quiet through all of this. Geordie still has his mad on. He sits at the table, arms crossed, obviously distrustful of Aaran and his motives for coming here. Bojo’s relaxed, slouched in his chair and giving the appearance that he’s only barely paying attention, but I get the sense he’s not missing a thing. I notice that Robert hasn’t touched his guitar since we came back to the kitchen and I wonder about that, just as I wonder about why he stayed out of sight when Aaran and Suzi first arrived. I guess if the stories about him are true, he wants to be cautious about who hears his music, and whom they might tell.

  At one point Aaran takes his laptop out of his briefcase and shows us the image of Jackson Hart that had appeared on his screen while Suzi had been using the machine to check her e-mail. He’d saved it as an HTML document so that he could bring it back up at any time, even when the computer’s off-line.

  Bojo sits up then and gives the grainy image a careful study before slouching back in his chair.

  “Recognize the place?” Robert asks.

  Bojo shakes his head. “But there’s not much to go by from that picture.”

  “Why would he recognize it?” Suzi asks.

  He smiles. “I travel a lot.”

  I can tell she feels she’s missing things here, that there are undercurrents she’s not getting. And let’s face it, there are. When she introduced herself, telling us so forthrightly how she lives on the street, almost making it a challenge, I think she expected us all to tell her more about ourselves in return. But no one did. For my part, I just wondered, why’s she with Aaran? And what’s her stake in all of this?

  I can accept Good Samaritanism—I wish the world had a lot more of it—but she came in a package with Aaran Goldstein, and while I’m willing to hear him out—hopefully to find something that will help us reclaim Saskia and the others—I don’t particularly like or trust him now any more than I ever have. Maybe it should be different, but the sad truth is, you’re always judged by the company you keep.

  There’s more talk and we finally start drifting into speculation again. I’m just about to make another retreat to the fire escape when we hear a banging on the front door downstairs. Snippet jumps up from under Holly’s chair and goes to the head of the stairs, ears twitching, a small growl rumbling in her chest. I glance at the wall clock. It’s a quarter to twelve.

  “Maybe this’ll be Estie,” Holly says as she gets up to go have a look.

  Snippet goes down the stairs, claws clattering on the wood, with Holly right behind her. Bojo waits a beat, then seems to not so much rise as drift out of his chair to follow them. The rest of us wait in the kitchen. From the happy sounds that come from downstairs, it’s obvious that the welcome the new arrivals are getting is far different from Aaran and Suzi’s. Bojo reappears and returns to his chair, dropping back into his slouch as though he’d never gotten up in the first place. Moments later, Holly leads her friends into the kitchen and for a few minutes chaos reigns as introductions are made all around.

  Sarah Taylor—Estie—turns out to be a tall, dark-haired woman with grave eyes and an air of quiet grace. Her girlish voice on the phone last night had put such a different image in my head that I wouldn’t have come close to recognizing her today without an introduction. She gives me a warm, sympathetic smile when we shake hands.

  “Have you heard anything from your friend?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “But we’ve got some new leads.”

  The dark-haired Hispanic man standing beside her perks up at that. I’ve already heard him introduced as Raul Flores, which would make him Benny Davis’s boyfriend, Benny being the one of the Wordwood founders who disappeared while on-line with Estie.

  “What have you heard?” he asks.

  I start to answer, but then Holly’s introducing me to someone else. I see Estie put her hand on Raul’s arm. She leans over to him and murmurs something in his ear, and he nods, but with obvious reluctance. I don’t blame him. If someone had even a scrap of information about Saskia, I’d say be damned to politeness and want to know right away as well.

  But Holly’s introducing me to Tom Pace—the one they call Tip—and I don’t have the chance to tell Raul what we’ve found out so far. Tip’s taller than me, a lean and lanky throwback to the old hippie days with his pony-tail hanging past his shoulders and long, wispy beard. His eyes are serious, peering at me from behind wire-framed glasses, and his features are thoughtful, but I can tell by the laugh lines around his eyes that he’s not always like this.

  The last of the newcomers is Claudette Saint-Martin, a full-figured black woman in a business suit with a delightful French accent. Apparently she was on her way to work when she got the call from Estie and simply had the cab she was in take her to the airport instead of the office where she’d originally been bound.

  There’s not nearly enough room in the kitchen, so we take what chairs we need and set up command central in the dining room where the computer’s waiting for us. The newcomers are startled when Dick seems to appear out of nowhere, but while they’re plainly intrigued, they’re too polite to ask about him. Holly and Bojo bring in a new round of coffee, tea, and soft drinks as we get settled. There’s a lot of cross-conversation, different people talking at once, but somehow everybody gets brought up to date.

  An awkward silence follows the revelation that Aaran was respon
sible for the virus that started all of this, and all heads turn in his direction. I actually feel sorry for him, but Suzi’s the one who speaks up for him.

  “Okay,” she says. “So he messed up. Didn’t any of you ever mess up? And at least he’s had the balls to come here to try and make amends.”

  I notice that Holly’s friends aren’t particularly impressed with that. They don’t seem too taken with Suzi herself, either, but I don’t have to wonder about that. She seems very nice—too nice to be in Aaran’s company, and that’s the problem. Aaran’s not exactly on anybody’s favorite people list that I know, though I have to say he’s doing a very good job of acting like a normal person today. Maybe he really is sorry about what he’s done and genuinely wants to make up for how badly he’s messed things up.

  Then the conversation turns to the mechanics of how they set up the original Wordwood site and speculations on how they might be able to recapture those original configurations. Estie reaches into her purse and pulls out a stack of floppy disks held together with a rubber band.

  “I managed to dig out my copy of the first back-up we did,” she says.

  “That’s good,” Tip says. “I couldn’t find mine. But the thing is, if there is an actual spirit in the Wordwood, won’t it have evolved since it was first created? I’m not sure there’s any point in starting at the beginning again.”

  “What we really need to do,” Claudette puts in, “is establish some sort of communication with whomever or whatever is running the show on the other end of that URL.”

  “You don’t have to play coy,” Estie says. “Not with anybody that’s here. We all know we’re dealing with the spirit that lives in the Wordwood.”

  “But we don’t know what it is,” Holly says.

  Claudette nods. “That’s true. But we still have to find some way to contact it.”

  “Except basics is still the best place to start,” Raul says. “You strip away all the fancy flash and plug-ins, and everything’s still built on that original HTML you guys wrote way back when.”